Address books and folders

  • Thread starter Thread starter mdc
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M

mdc

I'm new to Outlook (2000) and am confused about the
relationship between "folders" and "address books". What
I need is one master contact list and a choice of several
address books to open for sending individual emails (not
as groups). The same name could be in more than one
book. If a contact is edited, the changes need to appear
in each address book where that contact is used. Is this
possible? I know how to do groups for email and
categories for mail merge.

mdc
 
The Outlook Address Book is just a view....not a separate entity. You can
define multiple contacts folders in Outlook as address books.

If you have Exchange server, you can use a public contacts folder that
everyone can share and use as an address book.
 
Not an easy question. Outlook does not use an address book. It only uses
Contacts Folders. The Outlook Address Book will display each Contact folder
and subfolder that you enable as an email address book (in Properties).
There is no way to segregate your Contacts within the Outlook Address Book
view other than to use separate Contacts subfolders (it cannot be sorted by
category for example). But if you use separate Contacts Subfolders, then
Contacts that reside in more than one subfolder will not remain
synchronized.

The best solution really depends on what you need to do the most. There is a
good discussion of the pros and cons of categories VS separate Contact
subfolders here:
http://www.slipstick.com/contacts/oloabcat.htm

BTW, be sure you use Distribution Lists, not groups. And no, you cannot do a
mail merge to a category, unless you first filter your Contacts Folder by
Category and start the merge from Outlook, not Word.
 
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